It seems to me that NodeReader does a decent job of separating out the trolls, etc that try to pollute the Monastery, but reaped root nodes still show up in Newest Nodes, and reaped replies show up in their threads. I recognize and support the reluctance to ever remove a node completely, but I'd be in favor of not showing reaped nodes by default (perhaps unless they had unreaped replies). A check box on the user settings page could control this fairly easily.

The non-interventionist solution (i.e. one that doesn't require vroom's effort) is simply not clicking on nodes owned by the reaper, but I at least usually read new nodes without attention to the author. Though not a huge improvement, it would save some sliver of people's time and hide some of the trash from casual visitors.

Additionally, what if the hypothetical "view reaped nodes" checkbox were only available to Friar(6) and higher? In other words, you could view reaped nodes only if you can already consider nodes for reaping. Would somewhat reduce the audience that trolls seem to want.

Nodes that got reaped before they had any replies used to just completely disappear without a trace. A few rather serious bugs were found with that so the behavior was changed as a temporary solution. I'd like to have that behavior restored (with the bug fixed) when vroom or a duely appointed helper gets the time.

I'd also like the reaping of a node that has replies that have all been reaped to rereap the whole subtree of replies from the bottom up so the nodes are "just gone" and then move up to the parent node and rereap it if it was previously reaped but was hanging around because of this reply.

Perhaps the easiest solution for all of this is just a cron job that looks for recently (but not too recently) reaped nodes and purges any subtrees of nodes that contain only reaped nodes. "not too recently" means don't purge a reaped node if it is currently the last node of the site as that is what triggers the nasty bugs.